It
was around two o’clock on a mild mid-February afternoon that colleagues
called head archeologist Professor Yousef Madjidzadeh to look at some telltale
markings in a dusty trench. It was the last day of the six-week digging
season at the Jiroft archeological site in the southeast Iranian desert,
and Madjidzadeh was jotting down notes
before closing up for the year. The Iranian-born archeologist, who has
been excavating at Jiroft for two years, has become increasingly convinced
that the remains of this 4500-year-old city hold the key to a Bronze Age
kingdom whose existence promises to rewrite at least a chapter or two of
the history of the ancient Middle East.

“I took the pick in my hand and started to help dig out what turned
out to be a remarkably well-preserved stamp-seal impression,”
Madjidzadeh recalls, now back at his home in the Mediterranean port city
of Nice, France.

Painstakingly extracting the
five-centimeter- (2"-) long rectangle
from the trench wall’s packed clay, the archeologist turned it to the
sunlight. Amid faintly inscribed lines and images of human and animal
figures, he was amazed to discover what appeared to be an unfamiliar form
of writing. To Madjidzadeh, the seal impression came as his first evidence
that this ancient city’s society was literate.

“To be able to say that Jiroft was a historic civilization, not a
prehistoric one, is a great advance,” he says. “Finding writing on
that seal impression brought tears to my eyes. Never mind that we can’t
read it—that’ll come later.”

Though others have downplayed Madjidzadeh’s declarations that Jiroft
was more than a regional culture, archeologists generally agree, he says,
that a distinct civilization is characterized by unique monumental
architecture and by its own form of writing. “This past winter, we found
both,” he beams.

Gray-bearded, easy-going and energetic in his mid-60’s, Madjidzadeh
is feeling the glow of vindication. A few years after Iran’s 1979
revolution, he was dismissed as chairman of the department of archeology
at Tehran University. After years of self-imposed exile in Nice with his
French-born wife, he returned during the intellectual thaw that followed
the 1997 election of President Mohammad Khatami.

The discovery of the Jiroft site came by accident. In 2000, flash
floods along the Halil River swept the topsoil off thousands of previously
unknown tombs. Seyyed Mohammad Beheshti, deputy head of Iran’s Cultural
Heritage and Tourism Organization (ICHTO), asked Madjidzadeh to begin
excavations because of the archeologist’s long-standing bullishness on
Jiroft’s significance.

Excavations at
Jiroft’s Konar Sandal A, one of the site’s two major mounds,
are revealing the base of what may have been one of the world’s
largest ziggurats. (Mohammad Eslami-Rad / Gamma)

As the author of a three-volume history of Mesopotamia and a leading
Iranian authority on the third millennium BC, Madjidzadeh has long
hypothesized that Jiroft is the legendary land of Aratta, a “lost”
Bronze Age kingdom of renown. It’s a quest that he began as a doctoral
candidate at the University of Chicago, when in 1976 he published an
article proposing that Aratta, which reputedly exported its magnificent
crafts to Mesopotamia, was located somewhere in southeastern Iran.

According to texts dating from around 2100 BC, Aratta was a gaily
decorated capital with a citadel whose battlements were fashioned of green
lapis lazuli and its lofty towers of bright red brick. Aratta’s artistic
production was so highly regarded that about 2500 BC the Sumerian king
Enmerkar sent a message to the ruler of Aratta requesting that artisans
and architects be dispatched to his capital, Uruk, to build a temple to
honor Inanna, the goddess of fertility and war. Enmerkar addressed his
letter to Inanna: “Oh sister mine, make Aratta, for Uruk’s sake,
skillfully work gold and silver for me! (Make them cut for me) translucent
lapis lazuli in blocks, (Make them prepare for me) electrum and
translucent lapis!” prayed the Sumerian ruler.

“When one imagines that Uruk was the heart of the Sumerian
civilization and that its king is asking another ruler about 2000
kilometers (1200 mi) distant to send his artisans, one realizes that the
quality of their work must have been extraordinary,” says Madjidzadeh.
“The craftsmen must have been known all over. Today there is no doubt in
my mind that Jiroft was Aratta.” A handful of colleagues agrees,
including the French epigrapher François Vallat, who compares Jiroft to
the Elamite kingdom of southwestern Iran.

So far, however, there is no proof, and others are less sure.

“When you start reconstructing actual geographical regions based on
legend and mythology, you’re always in deep water,” says Abbas
Alizadeh, an Iranian-born archeologist at the Oriental Institute of the
University of Chicago. “Some scholars think Aratta is in Azerbaijan.
Others say Baluchistan or the Persian Gulf. It’s a murky business.”

Yet even if Jiroft turns out not to be Aratta, it is nevertheless a
pivotal clue to a better understanding of the era when writing first
flourished and traders carried spices and grain, gold, lapis lazuli and
ideas from the Nile to the Indus. Although not on a par with the more
influential civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus Valley,
“Jiroft is obviously a very important archeological complex,” says
Holly Pittman, an art historian at the University of Pennsylvania who is
one of a growing number of non-Iranian scholars who are being allowed into
the country. “It’s an independent, autochthonous Bronze Age
civilization with huge numbers of settlements of all different sizes that
we have only just begun to explore.” By comparison to the research
documenting other third-millennium civilizations, these are indeed very
early days, she explains. “We don’t yet have enough material to
compare it to Mesopotamia. But you have to remember that 500 teams of
archeologists have been digging in Mesopotamia for 100 years. In Jiroft,
we’ve had two seasons with one team of fewer than 30 scientists.”

“The artists
had such a naturalistic way of rendering images,” says Yousef
Madjidzadeh, foreground. “It was a style that was not seen
anywhere else in that era.”

Even so, among the spectacular finds so far are the remains of a city a
kilometer and a half (.92 mi) in diameter, an unusual two-story citadel
surrounded by a fortress wall 10.5 meters (34') thick, and a ziggurat
resembling Sumerian ones that is among the largest in the ancient
world—17 meters (54') high and 400 meters (1280') on each side at the
base. The team has also uncovered 25 stamp and cylinder seal impressions
from two to five centimeters (7/8"–2") long that depict bulls,
ibex, lions, snakes, human figures—and writing.

Perhaps the most impressive discoveries have been staggering numbers of
carved and decorated vases, cups, goblets and boxes made of a soft,
fine-grained, durable gray-greenish stone called chlorite. Literally tens
of thousands of pieces have been found, but the vast majority have been
looted from their original tombs by local farmers, who were the first to
stumble across the gargantuan honeycomb of gravesites uncovered by the
floodwaters of 2000.

“Thousands of people were digging,” Madjidzadeh explains, and
antiquities dealers swooped in behind them to buy up the finds by the
dozens. Farmers often sold chlorite vases worth tens of thousands of
dollars on the international market for a few sacks of flour. Ultimately,
in the fall of 2002, the Iranian authorities stepped in to halt the
looting and seize hundreds of contraband artifacts.

Major
archeological sites from the fourth and third millennia BC.

Chlorite vessels
similar to the stunning examples recently unearthed at Jiroft in
southeastern Iran have been found from the Euphrates to the Indus,
as far north as the Amu Darya and as far south as Tarut Island, on
the Persian Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia. Iranian-born archeologist
Professor Yousef Madjidzadeh speculates that some of these objects
were in fact imported from Jiroft, which he is convinced is the
legendary third-millennium-BC city of Aratta. Other archeologists,
however, dispute this conclusion, maintaining that the vases,
bowls and cups from Mesopotamian and Indus Valley sites were
manufactured locally. What is clear is that Jiroft traders brought
lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and carnelian from the Indus to
decorate the ornate vessels they manufactured.

The Jiroft artifacts are a “missing link” in understanding the
Bronze Age, Madjidzadeh says, because they help explain why so many
incised chlorite vessels, all with remarkably similar imagery, have turned
up at widely separated ancient sites, from Mari in Syria to Nippur and Ur
in Mesopotamia, Soch in Uzbekistan and the Saudi Arabian island of Tarut,
north of Bahrain. Until now, the principal center of production of these
vessels was a mystery. Although some of them were probably manufactured
locally, the sheer volume of artifacts at Jiroft argues that the most
prolific chlorite workshops of all were there. (See sidebar, page 8.)

Jiroft artisans fashioned pieces with what seems strange and enigmatic
iconography. Some were encrusted with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan,
carnelian from the Indus Valley, turquoise, agate and other semiprecious,
imported stones. “The artists had such a naturalistic way of rendering
images,” says Madjidzadeh. “It is a style that was not seen anywhere
else in that era.

“There must certainly have been a school of
stonecarvers, because you
see such an aesthetic unity of these objects throughout the kingdom. This
high-level artistic quality did not suddenly appear from nowhere,” he
maintains. “The traditions must have taken 300 to 400 years to
develop.”

Carved into one gray chlorite cup, mythic creatures with human heads
and torsos and bulls’ legs hold panthers upside-down by their tails. On
the surface of a stone weight shaped roughly like a ladies’ handbag, two
horned scorpion-men appear to swim toward each other. “Hunters who were
believed to be as powerful as bulls or as agile as lions entered into
legend, and their images became animalized as bull-men and lion-men,”
the archeologist suggests in explanation.

rom
the middle to the late third millennium BC, vases, bowls and cups
made of chlorite were traded throughout the area shown on the map
above. Similar to steatite and soapstone, the mineral was valued
by artisans because it was durable but soft enough to carve easily
and fine-grained enough to hold carved details well. Its color
ranged from jade green (from which came its Greek-derived name) to
smoky gray, with some pieces nearly as black as obsidian.

Although abundant chlorite
deposits are scattered across Iran and the Hajar Mountains of the
United Arab Emirates, archeologists have so far uncovered ancient
chlorite quarries and workshops in only two locations: at Tepe
Yahya in the Kerman province of southeastern Iran and at Tarut,
where some 600 intact vessels and fragments were unearthed. It is
still unclear where the raw material for the chlorite objects
found in Sumeria originated, and similarly, the chlorite mines at
Jiroft remain elusive.

Along with the chlorite objects are also pink and orange alabaster
jars, white marble vases, copper figurines, beakers and a striking copper
basin with a eagle seated in its center, as well as realistic carved stone
impressions of heraldic eagles, scorpions and scorpion-women.

Many of the scenes on the Jiroft vessels bear a strong resemblance to
the gods, beasts and plants portrayed on Sumerian statues, plaques and
cylinder seals. “Jiroft leads me to imagine that Iran had a far greater
influence on Mesopotamian culture than I previously thought,” observes
Jean Perrot, the grand old man of Middle Eastern archeology in France.

To Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University, who excavated a site
named Tepe Yahya some 90 kilometers (50 mi) from Jiroft in the 1970’s,
what is particularly remarkable about the Jiroft finds is that so many
thousands of brand-new, empty chlorite vessels were manufactured for no
other apparent purpose than to be buried in tombs to honor the dead.
“The fact that not a single one of them contains even a trace of oils,
perfumes, foodstuffs or drugs, nor shows any other sign of use, is very
curious,” he marvels.

Despite the crackdown on pillaging and the hiring of a dozen armed
guards, theft at Jiroft still continues. This winter, while working on the
city mounds, Madjidzadeh received a tip that looters were digging at
gravesites six kilometers (3.7 mi) away. Racing to the cemetery with one
of the guards, he caught sight of several dozen looters, who escaped on
foot when they saw Madjidzadeh coming. One of his laborers later told him
that it was rumored the looters had managed to spirit away a priceless
golden fish figure. One looted gravesite reportedly yielded an astonishing
200 artifacts, including 30 finely crafted chlorite vessels.

“Was it the tomb of the lord of Aratta?” asks Madjidzadeh sadly.
“Because all the objects were ripped out of context and have
disappeared, we’ll never know—even if they turn up in the antiquities
market.”

On his days off, the archeologist travels to surrounding villages to
give lectures about the significance of Jiroft and its irreplaceable
artifacts.

“I show photos of the objects and our excavations and tell the
villagers in simple language that all these works belonged to your
grandparents, your ancestors,” he explains. “‘They are your
heritage. You don’t sell your heritage. If we put these cups and vases
in a museum, they will attract tourists. This will bring more money than
selling the pieces once or twice. You and your children will benefit from
the tourists and education.’ Little by little, people understand more
about the cultural value of the finds.”

On the international art market, it’s a different story. Museums and
private collectors have been quick to recognize the cultural, esthetic
and, in particular, monetary worth of artifacts that Madjidzadeh is sure
were stolen from Jiroft.

“I scour the Internet, auction catalogues and brochures and have been
shocked to see museums in Switzerland, Japan, Turkey, Pakistan and
elsewhere buying these objects,” he says.

Top: An Iranian
archeologist and local workers dig on the west side of Jiroft’s
second mound, Konar Sandal B. Above: A slide of the cross section
of a third-millennium-BC tell—a mound created by centuries of
habitation—helps geomorphologist Éric Fouache explain that the
region’s many artesian wells made Jiroft’s development
possible. (Mohammad Eslami-Rad / Gamma)

Protecting Jiroft is an overwhelming task, for Madjidzadeh and his team
have uncovered more than 250 separate sites across an area about the size
of Austria or South Carolina. In the forested mountains 150 kilometers (90
mi) north of Jiroft, other archeologists have discovered copper mines that
likely produced the ore for the copper and bronze artifacts unearthed in
Jiroft’s gravesites. But so far, no one has pinpointed the chlorite
mines.

French geomorphologist Éric
Fouache, the team’s expert on reading
the strata underlying the archeological sites, has discovered something
else, however, which gave the Jiroft region a crucial advantage over
Mesopotamia: water. A network of artesian wells supplied abundant water
for irrigation and drinking even when the Halil River ran dry. With these
sources of water, the inhabitants developed an agriculture based on
calorie-rich date palms rather than the cereals of the Tigris and
Euphrates delta, says Fouache. Palm groves also provided shade for
extensive gardening.

“So it’s very possible the Jiroft people developed agriculture more
easily than the Mesopotamians,” asserts the scientist.

Next year, Fouache plans on probing deeper to locate earlier remains
buried by the region’s frequent tectonic upheavals. “Based on aerial
photographs showing traces of past ground shifts, we expect to find older
settlements not visible from the surface,” he says.

The primary Jiroft site consists of two mounds a couple of kilometers
apart, called Konar Sandal A and B and measuring 13 and 21 meters high
(41' and 67'), respectively. It was at Konar Sandal B that the
archeologists dug out the seal impressions bearing writing. So far, the
archeologists have excavated around nine vertical meters (28') of Konar
Sandal B, discovering vestiges of a monumental, two-story, windowed
citadel whose base covers nearly 13.5 hectares (33 acres). Madjidzadeh
speculates that this imposing edifice once housed the city’s chief
administrative center and perhaps a temple and a royal palace.

Finding the structure’s façade was difficult enough, but locating an
entrance took the team weeks of digging through clay packed hard by
millennia of rain-wash. “The mud is like stone,” Madjidzadeh
complains. “You can hardly get a pick into it.”

This winter they stumbled across what appears to be the city’s main
gateway, a squared-off earthen portal that closely resembles architectural
details depicted on several chlorite vases. The team has also uncovered a
second wall and vestiges of a third, with trenches exposing both private
houses and another sizeable public building—perhaps a trading center.

“We know it’s another monumental building because the bricks are
larger than the bricks used in private homes,” says Madjidzadeh.

According to the
archeologist, the enormous ziggurat at Konar Sandal A
was a tremendous feat of engineering that required four to five million
bricks. Like its Sumerian counterparts, it was probably a sacred
structure, a bridge between earth and sky, and it was probably topped by a
room where the city’s protective god could woo his mortal consort,
usually the wife or daughter of the ruler.

Although very little is known of the beliefs and rituals of Jiroft’s
inhabitants, Madjidzadeh is convinced that the practice of burying the
dead with a relative fortune in artifacts points to a well-organized
religion with a priestly class that could command the efforts of
craftsmen. Since the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh mentions
scorpion-men similar to ones carved on Jiroft’s stone vases, the
archeologist also suggests that parts of the Gilgamesh narrative
circulated in Jiroft and may even have had their origins there.

Madjidzadeh,
in white hat at center, examines objects found near Konar Sandal B
in a trench overseen by Romain Pigeaud of the Paris National
Museum of Natural History. (Mohammad Eslami-Rad / Gamma)

Another of the recent season’s top finds was the discovery by Marjan
Mashkur, an Iranian researcher based in Paris, of shark bones and shells
from the Persian Gulf, 200 kilometers (120 mi) south. To Madjidzadeh, this find
confirms that Jiroft merchants plied well-worn trade routes that led to
the Persian Gulf and on to Mesopotamia, dealing in chlorite vessels, lapis lazuli
and other precious stones, and commodities fabricated in Jiroft.

Even at this relatively early stage, Madjidzadeh believes he has enough
evidence to turn some of the fundamental precepts of Middle Eastern
archeology on their head. The fabulous royal treasure excavated in the
1920’s by Leonard Wooley at the Sumerian capital of Ur, including the
iconic, shell-encrusted ibex standing to nibble the leaves of a gold tree,
may ultimately be traced back to the workshops of Jiroft, he says. So
might chlorite vessels from Uruk, Mari and Soch.

“We’re not sure what gold pieces might have come from Jiroft,”
says Pittman, “but some of the chlorite pieces in Mesopotamia may well
prove to have been exported from this region of southeastern Iran.”

“Three years ago, I would have agreed with the common assertion that
Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization,” Madjidzadeh says. “Now
I’m changing my mind to Jiroft, which, in its heyday, was just as
important and as extensive as Sumerian civilization.”

For some in the field, this comparison sets off alarm bells.

Lamberg-Karlovsky is one of the
skeptics. While the Harvard professor
acknowledges the importance of the discovery of Jiroft and its chlorite
vessels, he warns against hyperbole. “To imply that Jiroft is the most
ancient Oriental civilization is way off the mark,” he argues. “In
terms of actual material recovered so far, there is nothing earlier than
2500 BC, which is a thousand years later than the southern Mesopotamian
world.”

Madjidzadeh, however, maintains that pottery found at Jiroft compares
to shards from Tepe Yahya dated to 2800 BC. In addition, he reasons, it
would have taken nearly half a millennium for Jiroft’s artisans to
develop the degree of skill that attracted King Enmerkar’s envy in 2500
BC, an inference that pushes back the establishment of Jiroft to about
3000 BC. Unfortunately, carbon dating of the vases and pots—the most
reliable technique for gauging the age of artifacts—is not possible at
Jiroft, since there have been absolutely no traces of organic residue in
any of the materials unearthed so far. The Harvard archeologist and others
deprecate Madjidzadeh’s contention. “These are very tenuous
conclusions,” says Lamberg-Karlovsky. “To try to put Jiroft on the
same level as the Sumerian, Egyptian and Indus Valley civilizations, or
even as the Bactrian material of central Asia, is to exaggerate and
distort the archeological record. Jiroft is just not in the same
ballpark.”

Based on his own chemical analyses of chlorite pieces from
Tarut,
Mesopotamia and elsewhere, Lamberg-Karlovsky states that the stone finds
in those places were mined locally. He is thus wary of claims that Jiroft
pottery was widely exported.

“It’s very significant that Jiroft was the center of production for
huge numbers of chlorite vessels, but to say that the vessels found in
Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and the Iranian plateau came from
Jiroft is patently false,” he declares.

Madjidzadeh counters that chlorite vessels may indeed have been
produced elsewhere—but by itinerant artisans and stonecutters originally
from Jiroft or local craftsmen imitating Jiroft styles.

For Rémy
Boucharlat, chief of the French Center for Scientific
Research in Tehran, it’s possible that Jiroft exported chlorite vessels
to Mesopotamia and beyond. “Yet we still don’t know if the
Mesopotamians carved their own imagery on unfinished stone or whether the
iconography originated in Jiroft,” he says.

The Oriental Institute’s Alizadeh agrees that Jiroft artisans could
well have traveled to Mesopotamia and other areas in the Middle East, but
he too deflates some of Madjidzadeh’s more grandiose claims, including
the assertion that Jiroft’s civilization predates Sumer’s. After
examining the writing on the seal impression uncovered in February, the
Chicago archeologist now doubts its authenticity. Compared to the
sophisticated systems of writing that already existed in the region by
2500 BC, the Jiroft artifact presents “an extremely vague series of
scratches,” he says.

“There’s great excitement about Jiroft because of the prodigious
number of chlorite vessels found there, but the problem is that we don’t
know anything about the makers of these objects,” argues Alizadeh.
“What is significant is the similarity to designs found in Elamite
culture, but to call Jiroft a civilization is not exactly true at this
point. Possessing a major manufacturing workshop does not qualify the site
as a civilization.”

Perhaps more exciting than the beautiful chlorite bowls, vases and
cups, which after all reveal little information about the ancient
inhabitants of Jiroft, says Boucharlat, are the newly excavated
settlements and buildings. “We’re now entering a second phase of
discoveries, one that goes beyond fine objects to a knowledge of the
culture and its relatively high level of social organization and technical
proficiency,” he explains.

Regardless of what impact the site ultimately makes on Middle Eastern
archeology, there is no doubt that Jiroft is serving as a pilot program
for Iranian professors and graduate students to work alongside
international—mainly American and French—colleagues.

“Before the 1979 revolution, there was tremendous collaboration
between Iranian and foreign archeologists,” notes Pittman, who first
came to excavate in Iran more than 25 years ago. “We’re trying to pick
up where we left off.”

As Madjidzadeh explains, “One of my conditions for inviting foreign
archeologists to participate at Jiroft is that they accept Iranian
students for training at their universities to learn updated techniques
and western methods of teaching.” Now, however, the obstacles to such
exchanges are not only on the Iranian side. Despite the University of
Pennsylvania’s eagerness to train Iranian researchers, the US government
has so far refused to grant them visas.

“It’s immensely frustrating,” Pittman admits. “Until the
geopolitical fireworks calm down a bit, we’re not going to have any luck
training them here in the us. And training the next generation of
archeologists is the most urgent need by far for the country’s
heritage.”

With more
archeologists, Iran could again become a hotspot for the
study of ancient civilizations. Certainly Madjidzadeh, who earns less in
Iran than a skilled laborer does in France and who pays his own airfares
between Nice and Tehran, is not in his profession for money. Ironically
for an archeologist once hounded out of the country, local officials in
the town of Jiroft are planning to name a square after him.

“I go to Iran because I love archeology and I love to help the
nation,” he says. “It’s a part of my life I could never change even
if I wanted to.”

You wouldn’t think that
6000-year-old bones and pottery shards would wow a bunch of
20-year-olds. But then you wouldn’t be reckoning with the
archeology students at Shiraz University.

“I felt like a celebrity,”
marvels Abbas Alizadeh. After a two-hour lecture to an auditorium
packed with students and locals, the Iranian-born archeology
professor from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
was besieged by questioners. “Finally, I had to escape,” he
laughs. Alizadeh, who in 2001 pioneered renewed Iranian-us
archeological ties, has witnessed firsthand the new surge to
research and protect Iran’s 10 millennia of cultural heritage.

It
was Madjidzadeh’s longstanding belief that Jiroft was
the third-millennium kingdom of Aratta that led Mohammad
Beheshti, deputy head of the Iranian Cultural Heritage and
Tourism Organization, wearing sunglasses, to offer the dig
to him.

It’s an urgent push that comes
just in time. As the country’s population grows exponentially,
monuments are being threatened by agricultural expansion and the
roaring pace of industrial development.

“The Iranian economy is
growing fast,” says Massoud Azarnoush, head of the Iranian
Center for Archaeological Research in Tehran. “New dams,
irrigation networks, highways, railroads and factories are under
construction everywhere. Once-remote areas are becoming accessible
to development and agriculture, which are proving a serious menace
to archeological remains.”

Although some 20,000 ruins are
listed with the national center, Azarnoush estimates that the real
total should be at least 10 times that—a staggering 200,000
historically significant archeological sites scattered around a
nation the size of Alaska, or three times the size of France.
It’s a heritage on a par with Egypt, Turkey or China. The sites
range from tiny settlements and cemeteries to sprawling cities
like Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid kings, and the earthen
citadel at Arg-e-Bam that in December 2003 was devastated by an
earthquake.

Today, Tehran devotes some $20
million annually to archeology, according to Azarnoush, and it
recently issued directives requiring building projects to avoid
damaging archeological remains. “In many cases, we’ve
succeeded in protecting uncovered sites and relocating highways,
rail lines and dams,” he points out.

Still, there are thousands of
sites at risk. Leading the list are extensive Elamite and
Sassanian finds threatened by sugar-cane farming in Khuzestan
province and pre-Bronze Age settlements at Tepe Pardis, on the
outskirts of Tehran, whose bricks are being cannibalized for
housing.

Other sites, like Jiroft, suffer
rampant looting fueled by demand from international museums and
collectors. “Of course, Iran is trying to stop this trafficking,
but when museums with huge resources buy the objects, it doesn’t
matter how much protection you have for the sites,” Azarnoush
complains. Although the country’s chief monuments have armed
guards, remote areas are patrolled by the “Guardians of Cultural
Heritage,” an informal brigade of around 10,000 unarmed
volunteers who report thefts to local police.

Key to reducing looting is
public education similar to the efforts of Jiroft’s Yousef
Madjidzadeh, together with a campaign to open up ongoing digs to
visits from local residents and foreign tourists so they can see
what a proper job looks like, and appreciate the emerging
heritage.

“One of the first things we
did at Bam after the earthquake was to create a passage through
the ruins to permit visitors to see the damage to the citadel,”
says Azarnoush.

Sedigheh
Piran produces an archeological drawing at the National
Museum of Tehran. Such drawings “unroll” the
decoration on three-dimensional objects and help
archeologists visualize all of the design at once.
(Mohammad Eslami-Rad / Gamma)

And after some 25 years of
isolation, the Islamic Republic is letting international teams
back into the country, thanks in large part to Azarnoush and
Seyyed Mohammad Beheshti, deputy head of the Iranian Cultural
Heritage and Tourism Organization (ICHTO). In August 2003, the
government invited some 40 scholars, including professors from
Harvard University, the University of Chicago and the University
of Pennsylvania, to tour important sites and negotiate shared
excavations.

“The Iranians are doing an
outstanding job preserving some major monuments, undertaking new
site surveys and trying hard to control looting,” observes
Harvard’s Carl Lamberg-Karlovsky, who is now working with local
archeologists at Bronze Age sites in the Atrak river valley near
the border with Turkmenistan. “But this rebirth of international
cooperation is immensely welcome. Isolation kills science.”

The key to the new agreements is
that an equal number of Iranians and foreigners participate in the
digs. “Under the Shah, outside expeditions came in, did their
research and left,” Azarnoush explains. “There was virtually
no scientific benefit for Iranians.”

Now, a team sponsored by the
German Archaeological Institute is exploring copper mines from the
fourth millennium BC discovered near Isfahan; Japanese
archeologists are surveying the third-century city of Jalaliyeh;
French researchers are poring over remains of Cyrus the Great’s
fifth-century-BC capital at Pasagardae near Persepolis; and
scientists from the University of Sydney are unearthing finds from
second-millennium-BC Elamite sites near the Iraqi border.

For
Azarnoush, who earned his
doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles, the
decades of isolation proved an accidental boon in at least one
respect.

At
the Jiroft dig site’s dormitory, University of
Pennsylvania doctoral student Karen Sonik and Iranian
colleagues discuss the progress of the second digging
season. (Mohammad Eslami-Rad / Gamma)

“It forced us to become more
self-reliant,” he maintains. “Now we are better able to
negotiate excavation terms on a more equal basis. We desperately
need these outside collaborations in order to modernize our
research and persuade our overly traditional archeologists that
they have to broaden their teamwork with paleozoologists,
paleobotanists, physicists and other branches of science.” Under
these academic joint ventures, Iranians and foreigners also will
cooperate on post-excavation conservation plans and bilingual
publication of results, he adds.

Last May, in a gesture of
goodwill, the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago
returned to Tehran 300 ancient Persian clay tablets that had been
unearthed in the 1930’s. It was the first batch of several
thousand cuneiform tablets that will be repatriated after the
Institute finishes photographing them for a digital inventory.

Since the Oriental Institute’s
Alizadeh first began traveling back to Iran in the mid-1990’s,
he has begun to help set up an archeobiological laboratory in
Tehran to house bones and seeds from various sites around the
country. Earlier, he salvaged thousands of pottery shards that had
lain underwater for decades in the cellars of a museum in Tehran,
and created a databank to catalog them. He is training young
archeologists to establish mini-databanks for the network of 52
regional research centers at principal excavations around the
country.

What has struck the Chicago
professor most during his time back in Iran is the insatiable
hunger of students to pursue archeology despite the shortages of
professors, equipment and training materials. “Even though I
warn them they are going to be unemployed for a long time, maybe
forever, they say they love it and won’t give up,” he
explains. “It’s both sad and encouraging.”

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